Someday I must sit under those branches, and listen, and find out…
A great breath of sound went up, a hiss, a gasp—and the sunlight broke over the edge of the world and sheened off all the saurians’ hides, and caught in all their eyes. Rhiow had to look away, near-blinded by the brilliance.
She leaned over to Urruah. “Let’s get out of here and leave them their world,” Rhiow said. “They’ve suffered enough for it. Time for the joy…”
The team made their way over to the gates, which were all in place, warp and weft sheening with power as usuaclass="underline" the reconfiguration below and the release of the catenary tree had completely restored them to their default settings. Through the central gate, Track 30’s platform was now visible: they could see T’hom, looking back at them and seeming extremely relieved. He was sidled, which was just as well, for the place was full of ehhif going about their business, and he was doing the usual shuffle to keep from being knocked off the platform.
Urruah looked at the gate with some concern and turned to Rhiow. “Well?” he said.
She looked at him, shook her head, then rubbed cheeks with him.
“Consort,” he said. “I liked the sound of that.”
“You would,” Rhiow said. “Sex maniac. Go on… and good luck. Get yourself sidled when you go through. But otherwise, if worst comes to worst, look us up again, next life. It wouldn’t be the same without you.”
Urruah snorted, meaning to sound sardonic, but his eyes said otherwise. He leaped through the gate—
—came down on the other side, a silver tabby, back to normal size, quite alive; Rhiow could see the scars. She put her whiskers forward, well pleased.
Arhu, less worried, came over to the gate next. He looked up at Ith, who walked with him and peered through curiously. “Your world … Is it like this one?”
Arhu cracked up laughing. “Oh, yes, exactly. Not a whisker’s difference.”
Ith looked at him sidewise.
“Yeah, right. Look, Ith, come on through and have some pastrami,” Arhu said.
Ith bent down toward him, gave him the bird-eyeing-the-worm look, but it was absolutely cordial, the salute of one member of the great Kinship to another …even though there was still a glint of appetite there.
“I believe you would say, ‘You’re on,’ ” Ith said. “I will come shortly. Meanwhile, my brother, my father … go well.”
Arhu slipped through … and was small and black and white again.
Rhiow and Saash looked at each other. Then Rhiow slowly leaned forward and rubbed cheeks with her friend: first one side, then the other.
“Stay in touch,” she said, “if you can.”
“Hey,” Saash said softly, “it’s not like I’m going to be dead or anything. Just busy…”
Rhiow took a long breath, gazed around her, then stepped through onto the platform on Track 30—
—and came down light on her paws. She lifted one to look at it. Small again: the central pad unusually large: normal for this world…
Rhiow turned and looked through the gate. Saash was standing there in her Old Downside guise, a tortoiseshell tigress momentarily glancing over her shoulder at the ancient world, the dawn coming up, its glitter and sheen on the hides of the saurians watching it for the first time. Then she turned, locked eyes with Rhiow, leapt through the gate—
The Downside body stripped away as she came, and Saash was surrounded and hidden in a swirl of—not light as such, but reconfiguration, self and soul shifting into some new shape. Not vanishing, please, Iau—
That swirling, shifting, faded. Saash stood there … but not in her old body, which seemed to have declined to continue any further. This new shape was one that no nonwizardly ehhif could have seen, and even an ehhif wizard might have had to work at it if the body’s owner didn’t wish to be seen. To Rhiow’s eyes, she was still looking at Saash .,. but something subtle had happened to her; her physicality seemed to have been refined away, leaving her standing in the familiar delicate form, but now filled with forces that made Rhiow blink to look at them steadily. They were the forces with which Saash had always worked so well… and it was now obvious why, for they filled her the way light fills a window.
Saash shook herself, looked down at her flanks, and dulled down the glow by an effort of will. She turned then and smiled at Rhiow. Sorry, she said.
“For what?” Rhiow said softly.
Well… yeah. Oh, Rhi, there’s a lot to do, I have to get going!
“Go on, then. Go well, Tenth-lifer—and give the Powers our best when you see Them.”
Saash smiled, rubbed past Urruah, trailed her tail briefly over bis back, took a friendly swipe at Arhu with one shining paw as she passed; saluted T’hom and Har’lh with a flirt of her tail; and walked off down the platform, glowing more faintly as she passed on—a wizard still, but one now in possession of much enhanced equipment, now reassigned to some more central and senior catchment area. Only once she paused. Rhiow stared, wondering—
Saash sat down on the platform and had one last good scratch. Then she washed the scratched-up fur down again, flirted her tail one last time, walked off into the darkness, and was gone…
T’hom came over to them then and hunkered down to greet them: Har’lh was with him. As she trotted over to them, it occurred to Rhiow that there was something odd about the track area: it looked cleaner, brighter, than usual. However, for the moment she put that aside. “Har’lh!” she said, and rubbed against him: possibly unprofessional behavior toward one’s Advisory, but she was extremely glad to see him. “Where in Iau’s name have you been?”
“About half a million lightyears away,” Har’lh said with annoyance, “freezing my butt off on a planet covered a thousand miles deep with liquid methane. Somebody wanted me way out of the way while something happened here, that was plain. Met some nice people, though: they needed help with some local problems… I did a little troubleshooting. No point in wasting the trip.” He looked at them all. “Now what’s been going on here??”
“That’ll take some telling,” Rhiow said.
“Let’s walk, then,” T’hom said.
They headed out of the track areas, up into the main concourse. Arhu and Urruah looked up and around them as they went, and Urruah’s tail was lashing in surprise. The Terminal looked satisfyingly solid and hard-edged again, much improved over the last time they had seen it, with multiple time-patches threatening to slide off the fabric of reality like a wet Band-Aid. Ehhif were going about their business as usual.
“Have they cleaned this place again in the last day or so?” Urruah said. “It looks so… bright, it’s… no. It’s not just the sun. I know this place always looks good in the morning, with the sun coming in the windows like that, but…”
T’hom smiled a little as they walked up past the waiting room and toward the Forty-second Street doors. “It won’t often look this good, I think,” he said. “This is how we knew you’d succeeded, down there, in some big way. All the manuals went crazy for a while, and all they would say was reconfiguration, reconfiguration, all over them. But then everything steadied down, and all the time-patching we’d been holding in place by force just hauled off and took, hard. Something of a relief.”